In industry, inventory systems are commonplace. This is particularly the case in the travel industry. An inventory system is one which can control availability of resources, for example through pricing, revenue management associated with profit or cost and any calculations associated therewith. This enables a customer to purchase or book an available resource, for example, a hotel room, a seat on a vehicle such as an airplane or a train, or any other suitable resource. In addition, the inventory system allows a provider to manage the available resources and maximize revenue and profit in provision of these resources to the customer.
In general today's inventories in the travel domain are controlled by means of recommendations uploaded from an offline revenue management system. Whilst these work, there are a number of problems with their operation. In particular, the process of relying on an offline upload is both time-consuming and cumbersome. In addition, the offline revenue management system tends to make too many calculations, and not necessarily at the right time in the process, which again causes problems of delay and unnecessary processing. In addition, the data on which the off-line computation is made may not be up-to-date at the time the optimization process takes place. Finally, the current off-line revenue management systems degrade their network optimizations by using intermediate recommendations messages to the on-line request evaluation system, since these recommendations may not convey all the dimensions of the optimal solution.
A number of solutions have been proposed to improve the revenue management problem, but all rely on off-line computations of recommendations. For example, “Revenue management in a dynamic network environment” (MIT/INSEAD: Transportation Science, Vol. 37, No. 3, August 2003, pp. 257 to 277.) discloses a method for optimizing the calculation of availability in a booking domain. The method uses two systems, one online and one offline. The online system is merely indicated and there is no suggestion of any technical details. The patent literature in the form of WO05/0621958 discloses a method and apparatus for revenue management of callable products such as airlines and hotels. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,918,209 discloses a method and system for determining marginal values for use in a revenue management system. Both patent documents disclose a single system for optimizing revenue by selectively deciding what to sell, to whom, and at what price.
Effective revenue management is critical to the success of many inventory systems. The main disadvantage of existing revenue management systems is that they are traditionally offline systems computing recommendations meant to be used in an online environment. This is a historic distinction that has remained a problem. The result of offline computing is recommendations based on input data that may not be up to date at the time the recommendations are used by the online requested evaluation system. There is a number of unnecessary calculations carried out which may never be used in controlling the inventory. Improvements have emerged with the advent of dynamic pricing approaches, but again, the overall method is still based on imperfect information that is generated at regular intervals rather than at the time required by the system. In addition, maintaining interfaces between two such systems is intrinsically a source of cost and potential problems and a solution is sought to overcome this.